Countless appearances on TV’s “Entertainment Tonight” and a series on indispensable books about film over four decades have made Leonard Maltin the go-to guy on the topic of movies. His passion for all things cinema will turn to the Jewish experience in Hollywood when he speaks Sunday on the opening night of the Lenore Marwil Detroit Jewish Film Festival.

Maltin, 66, says he gained his appreciation of old Hollywood as a kid growing up in New Jersey. “I am a child of the first TV generation. I was born in 1950, and growing up then, TV was a living museum of movies,” he remembers. "Now you have to go to one or two channels — TCM for example — but in those days, you couldn’t avoid seeing old movies. I watched Laurel and Hardy and the Little Rascals every day of my life, all of the old cartoons and, most significantly, Walt Disney every week."

As his knowledge grew, so did his understanding that Jewish people — serving as directors, actors, technicians and especially the movie studio brass — were instrumental in shaping the movies that he loved. He learned that many of his favorite actors had changed their names. “Issur Danielovitch became Kirk Douglas. David Daniel Kaminsky became Danny Kaye. Emanuel Goldenberg became Edward G. Robinson,” he says. "The idea was to take these Jewish names or difficult-sounding names and to turn them into something all-American."

"How the Jews Invented Hollywood — and Shaped the American Dream" is the title of the talk he'll deliver Sunday. He spoke with the Free Press in advance of his appearance here.

QUESTION: Did you have relatives who were in the entertainment industry?

ANSWER: My mother was a singer who semi-retired when she had children. My father was an immigration judge, but his brother, who died when I was very young, had been a songwriter and pianist. I was very aware of show business growing up. My father subscribed to the weekly edition of Variety, and as a kid, I started reading it with great fascination.

I got interested in movie history pretty young by watching those vintage comedies. They piqued my curiosity, and I’d go to the library and read whatever there was about Charlie Chaplin, about Laurel and Hardy, about Buster Keaton and (movie producer) Mack Sennett. The first book I ever took out of the library was Mack Sennett’s autobiography, so I got a feel for that silent-film era. I learned ultimately about the role and influence that the Jewish movie moguls had on forming the movie industry.

Q: What difficulties did anti-Semitism pose in these pioneering days of the Hollywood studios?

A: That wasn’t so much an issue of anti-Semitism as an issue of assimilation. Here were these men, some of them American-born, some of them foreign-born, who got into a business that was open to them because it barely existed at all. Where other industries would have shut them out, show business was wide open. Nobody barred them because nobody knew what it was, at first. Ultimately, when they became successful and prosperous, they realized that to reach the widest possible audience, they wanted to make films that depicted the American dream and the American ideal. That’s exactly what they did. They essentially painted a portrait of a de-ethnicized America.

Jews were mostly depicted in a stereotypical way (in films of the 1930s especially). They were mostly pawnbrokers and clothing merchants. Of course, this was a time when Hollywood movies were rife with stereotypes. All cops were Irish, all laundry men were Chinese, all food vendors were Italian. This was the standard operating procedure. In the late 1930s, some of those stereotypes started to fade away a little bit. … Of course, everything changed after World War II. People’s experiences during the war altered a lot of perceptions and raised a lot of awareness and consciousness. Hollywood was never quite the same.

Q: For years, I was never more than a few feet away from a dog-eared copy of your brick-sized “TV Movies” guide (published since the late 1960s). It had capsule reviews and star ratings of thousands of films. Now, like everyone else, I go to Internet sites like the Internet Movie Database. What is the status of the movie guide?

A: The guide has expired; 2015 was its last edition. But what I have kept alive and even revised is the “Classic Movie Guide,” which deals with films prior to 1965. We have a third edition branded by TCM in which we have added 300 movies that we never covered before.

People don’t want to pay for (movie guides on the Internet). We had this wonderful app that some fellows licensed from Penguin, my publisher, but they had the nerve to charge for it. IMDb is free, so that’s the problem. You can’t compete with free. What we had (in the old “TV Movies” book) was curated information. I wrote about 50% of the reviews, but I was also the editor in chief. If I would get a review from one of my contributors that raved about a film that got terrible notices, I would say that something is cockeyed here. I would either assign it to someone else, or I would be the tiebreaker and go check this one out myself.

Q: I used to yell at your book because you dismissed some of my favorite films, "Taxi Driver" most notably. Why did that film get such a low rating?

A: That was deliberate. That was my contrary review. People gave me a lot of grief about this over the years, but what I did in recent years was I added a line that said that this film was obviously influential. I wanted to acknowledge that my personal opinion was not necessarily the prevailing thing. The other film was "Blade Runner." I saw it three times and still feel the same about it. When I first saw “Alien," I am a wimp and found it scary and upsetting, and I couldn’t get past that. On the 25th anniversary, when it was re-released and Ridley Scott did a couple of tweaks to the edit, I went to see it and thought it was masterful. In those 25 years, it was copied and ripped off so many times by inferior filmmakers that when I revisited the original, I missed the boat on this. I have changed the review completely.

Q: What do you think of the current state of film criticism and how do you fit into it?

A: Is there a current state of film criticism? We live in the age of the amateur. It’s not a pejorative comment; it’s a fact. Everybody is a blogger, a writer, a critic. Everybody is an artist, a musician, a filmmaker. The gatekeepers no longer prevail.

In theory, I cheer the democratization that the Internet has brought forth and that you can self-publish now. Everyone can publish a professional-looking book and sell it on Amazon. It’s fantastic. But we’ve lost something in that process, too. Not everyone’s opinion is equally valid or worthy or supported by knowledge or intelligence or discerning thought, and I feel lucky I got started when I did. My timing was good.

I’m online. I file new reviews every week on my website, leonardmaltin.com, and host with my daughter a weekly podcast called "Maltin on Movies" where we have a wonderful lineup of guests. I still get excited to see something new and stimulating; that gets my juices flowing. That means I want to spread the word about it. I love having a website where I can write anything I want.

I have no problem with Rotten Tomatoes (the aggregate critic site). I think it’s an interesting shorthand approach to getting an idea of what people think of movies, but every tomato is a critic. If you eliminate all of the critics, there won’t be any tomatoes left.

Leonard Maltin will speak at 8 p.m. Sunday at the Berman Center for the Performing Arts in West Bloomfield. His appearance will be followed by a screening of "The Last Laugh," a documentary from filmmaker Ferne Pearlstein that explores the taboo topic of Holocaust humor. $32, $27 for JCC members.